Another law of this union is, that without disturbing this imprisonment of the other senses; or, that I may express myself less equivocally than in metaphor, without restoring to them their sensibility to external impressions, the soul can, during sleep, beget the motions necessary to the execution of those acts of the will, which the ideas on which she busies herself suggests to her. Taken up with ideas relative to the pleasures of love, delivered up to lascivious dreams, those objects which she paints to herself, produce upon the organs of generation the same motions that they would have produced in the time of being awake, and the act naturally consummates itself in reality, if it is consummated in the imagination. The accident to Horace in one of the places of repose on his journey to Brundusium, is well known.
Hic ego mendacem stultissimus usque puellam,
Ad mediam noctem expecto: somnus tamen aufert
Intentum veneri: tum immundo somnia visu
Nocturnam maculant vestem, ventremque supinum.
The organs of generation, on the other hand, when they are the first irritated, sometimes excite nothing but the imagination, and bring on dreams, which terminate as the precedently mentioned ones. These principles serve to explain the different kinds of these nocturnal pollutions.
The first is that which proceeds from an over-abundance of the seminal liquid; it is what persons in the vigor of life, who are sanguine, hearty, and continent, are liable to. The heat of the bed coming to rarefy the humors, and the seminal liquid being more susceptible of rarefaction than any other, the irritated vesiculæ hurry away the imagination, which, being destitute of the helps that would discover the illusion to her, delivers herself wholly up to it; the idea of coition produces the ultimate effect of it, the ejaculation. In this case, this evacuation is not a disease; it is rather a favorable crisis, that disembarrasses from a humor, which, in too great an abundance, or too long retained, might be rather hurtful: and though some Physicians, who have no faith but in what they themselves have seen, have denied it, it is not the less true that this liquid may, by its over-abundance, produce disorders different from the priapism or the furor uterinus. I hope I may be allowed a short digression on this question; it is not a foreign one to my subject.
Galen has preserved to us the history of a man and woman to whom the excess of the seminal liquid was the cause of bad health, and who were both of them cured by renouncing that continency to which they had taxed themselves[133]; and he looks on the retention of this humor as capable of producing very bad effects. I had, at Montpelier, occasion to make an observation, in every point similar to that great man’s. A widow, of a healthy vigorous habit of body, of near forty years of age, who had for a long time been accustomed to the enjoyments of the nuptial bed, and had been for some years deprived of them, used, from time to time, to fall into such violent hysteric fits, that she lost the use of her senses by them: no remedy could dissipate those fits; there was no way to make her come out of them but by strong frictions of the genital parts, which procuring to her a convulsive tremor, followed by a copious ejaculation, she, that instant, recovered her senses.
Zacutus Lusitanus relates a case very similar to this. “A girl (says he) was in a very violent convulsive paroxysm, so as to be on the point of suffocation by it; without feeling, without sense, a general tremor over her whole body, her eyes set; having tried all other remedies in vain, I ordered an acrid irritative pessary to be applied, which produced a copious spermatic evacuation, and she immediately recovered her senses[134].”